Phil Brierley on winning tourism forecasting part two

I was Team “Sali Mali” which won the seasonal part of the online tourism forecasting competition. The aim was to produce the smallest MASE for the 427 quarterly time series and 366 monthly timeseries. In this article, I brieﬂy describe the methods used.

Basic algorithms

No new time series forecasting algorithms were developed speciﬁcally for this contest. We basically took algorithms that already existed as ‘building blocks’ and combined their forecasts in speciﬁc ways. Based on Athanasopoulos et al. (2011), and using the R package ‘forecast’ (Hyndman, 2011), four base algorithms were used:

1. Seasonal Naïve;

2. Damped Holt-Winters

3. ARIMA;

4. ETS.The benchmark to beat was the ETS algorithm.

The benchmark forecasts were replicated and visually inspected and it became clear that the forecasts for some of the series (only one or two) were clearly ‘unlikely’, in the sense that they basically went oﬀ the scale. The other algorithm sseemed to give much more realistic forecasts for these particular series.

The approach then taken was to concentrate on protecting against these ‘disastrous’ forecasts. The mindset was not thinking how to improve the overall accuracy, but how to prevent the worst case events. One way of achieving this is by not putting all your eggs in one basket (i.e. only relying ona single algorithm). This technique is commonly known as ‘ensembling’

An ensemble approach

Two methods were used in the ensembling process:

1. The last 12 months of the training data was set aside as a holdout set, and the MASE acrossall the series was calculated for each algorithm on this set. Based on these MASE values, aweighting was assigned to each algorithm, with the total of the weightings summing to 1. Thus four predictions were made for each series, with the ﬁnal prediction being a weighted av-erage. The weights for each algorithm where consistent across each series within the monthlyand quarterly series types. This global weighted average method gave an improvement overthe baseline method.

2. Forecasts for three algorithms (Damped, ARIMA, ETS) were generated using four diﬀerentsized training windows. The Seasonal Naïve forecast was then added, to give 13 forecasts foreach point in each series. The ﬁnal forecast for each point was then the median value of these 13 individual forecasts. This local selection method also gave an improvement over the baseline method.

The ﬁnal solution was then a weighted average of methods 1) & 2).

The cheat factor

If the ﬁrst 12 months of the benchmark forecast is simply replicated for the second 12 months, rather than relying on the algorithms forecasts for months 13-24, then the overall benchmark accuracy was improved. This is in line with the organisers’ ﬁndings that as the time horizon increases, the gain in accuracy of certain algorithms over the seasonal naïve method was diminished. The leaderboard was used to determine the ‘year two growth factor’ that should be applied. It was found that just multiplying the ﬁrst year’s predictions by approximately 1.04 gave the best second year predictions, as determined by the leaderboard score. In other words, the forecasts for months 13–24 obtained from the algorithm were completely disregarded and replaced by a simple multiple of the ﬁrst year’s forecasts.

Comments on the competition

The prediction dates for the time series are more than likely to be the last two years available, meaning that the physical dates are the same for many series (this hypothesis is based on our ﬁnding that a growth rate of 1.04 seemed to work across all series). Because tourism ﬁgures are likely to be aﬀected by global factors (GFC, exchange rates, etc., that are largely unpredictable) it is likely the values will all trend similarly. Thus the conclusion that one algorithm is better for tourism data than another algorithm must be treated with caution as it might just be the algorithm that fortunately got the trend correct for that particular moment in time. It is suggested that more generalizable results may have been obtained if the series were deliberately staggered in time.

It seems common practice to report time series on a calendar month basis. In reality people operate on a weekly cycle, not a monthly cycle. This causes problems in series that have signiﬁcant daily ﬂuctuations — for example car hire volumes can be very diﬀerent during the week than the weekend. The implication for forecasting is that a big diﬀerence between one month and the next, or the same month in the previous year, can be due to the diﬀerence in having four weekends in a month and ﬁve weekends in a month. Reporting tourism ﬁgures in a four weekly cycle rather than a monthly cycle would lead to improvements in forecast accuracy, and this may give better reward for eﬀort than additional algorithm development.